Paul Little: We're the surveillance state

Children in early-childhood education, ages 3 to 5, are to be given ID numbers.

It's not the fact of having a number that should concern us ... it's the compulsion and the reason for it. Given the only group of children who must compulsorily attend early-childhood education are those of beneficiaries, it is hard to see that it is aimed at anyone except them.

It leaves us asking: why? What is broken that this will fix?

With characteristic dissimulation, the Ministry of Social Development insists there is no need for concern. At the same time it won't rule out that these numbers could be used in the future to monitor how well parents are sticking to newly introduced "obligations" to seek work, which many believe are unworkable.

We have lots of numbers in our lives but most are voluntary. We choose to have a passport or a driver's licence. They are not assigned by the state, at an age when we've only just got the hang of flushing the toilet, simply because we exist and have disadvantaged parents.

This Government operates on the principle, if that's not too noble a word for it, that it is easier to marginalise beneficiaries than help them. It just wants them to go away.

Meanwhile, it will insist beneficiaries look for jobs that aren't there, without accepting an equivalent obligation to create jobs.

Many feel it's not the Government's job to make jobs but it has a part to play and it acknowledges this by paying someone to be Minister of Employment.

ID numbers for preschoolers are not something we should welcome, but, unfortunately, they are typical of the sort of thing we need to get used to in the surveillance state that we are becoming.

Continued below.

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You can feel the relief, can't you? She must have been suffering terribly. But hard as I try, I can't summon up a lot of sympathy for the plight of the internationally popular, much-loved, happily married, mother-of-three gazillionaire writer.

Because "without hype or expectation" is how Rowling's first book entered the world - no one knew Harry Potter was going to be that Harry Potter when Philosopher's Stone was published.

For lightning to strike an unknown author once is wonderful; to expect it to happen a second time verges on greedy.

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